Young Writers Society

1. blind trust

i do not even remember,
but at the old house, my mom carried car keys in her mouth
and coffee and a newspaper in her hands in the morning.

and when we are born, there is no one to say
"that's not usually how we do things"
and no one to stop you from
putting the car keys in your mouth
even when your hands are empty.

and you try to blame it on youth
until you realize that the choir of shouting and stressed voices
that seep through the walls around you
has become your own
and your throat is raw
though you said it would never be
because we just do what we see
and we follow what we see
and we do not think and we just see.

so how would it feel to put keys in my mouth
now that i know better? now that i see?

2. living dead

i am sure you are
on the other side of the lake
i am sure because you told me in may
that you would be there
and there is a warm mist hanging on the water
as if you're clinging to me the way
i cannot stop thinking of you.

each day is a certain number of days since a day
a year since we met and six months since we left
another set of mondays since the one we skipped work
another necklace of weekends beyond a ring and a walk

i think that when we die we will all be okay
because if i can feel this torn and beaten
at an uprooted whim that you are
on the other side of the lake
then i will walk forever in a world full of ghosts,
marking in layers like strands of hair
the same day as her last day
and the same day as her first
and on any day, white candles
reflected in still water.

3. anchor and buoy

i am still waiting and watching
every so often
until it is true and it happens and
i can shout at the top of my lungs
deep within my chest
that i knew it -- i knew it --
i saw it and when i asked
you made it my paranoia,
you made it my guilt,
you left me dragged down in the river
and i saw only the tops of your heads
peering down with flowers up behind you.

"this is a happy scene and a happy place
and you are the one making it dark."

why, he is just helping out a friend.
why, they live in the same direction, so of course.
why are you trying to cork up his generosity.
why, she is just social, just vibrant, that's just her.


i will scream, i swear i will scream it to myself

i told you so i told you so i told you so
years later, months later, we have been finished and they begin

there is a sixth sense or a seventh sense
something unknown and unacknowledged,
but so real -- i smelled or saw it in small spaces
how the future would become.

you are still taking your time and pretending not to
but i will not wash away in a pond that is still
and watching and waiting; no current.


i will scream and then i will flow away,
memories of you both just browning petals
floating on the water and then noiselessly
sinking.

4. again, this year will be my best

i am a sharpening knife, searing in the sun
as each month my body works better, fits better in the world.
saturday morning i am stiff in my back and an ache in my calves,
and i think "am i about to bleed?"
but my sheets are still clean, and my pants are still clean,
but as soon as i sit down to check, then i flow.
i am mastering my own body, i am sensing my own starts.

and how surreal, these days, that i can walk home thinking
i am feeling the most lonely i have felt all year
and who should i reach out to, i know i should reach out to someone
but in fear of being a burden, i am still and silent.
still the universe hears the understone of my screaming song
and sends me a message of love
"i hear she thinks you'll get married;
let's have dinner and let me meet him."

and i am still alone when i reach home,
but a thought of me hangs in the air;
i see it like lightning hung across the sky --
a faraway signal just to me that they all can see.

and i have waited for spring for months,
because this winter has been more frozen than most;
i have waited to stretch my legs and step out of a cage
and what has the world prepared for me now?

it feels like each year they are inventing
new flowers i have never seen before
but no one is surprised; they all pretend they have always been here.

sure, okay, i will play along, my universe.
it is hard to spend a weekend inside when i am still
in the habit of punishing myself with trash,
but if i sit down and think of it, god,
i am loved.

5. thank you

Each mouth of each babe will tell you
that a plant needs dirt and water and sun,
and I have dirt, and I cry so often,
but I thought I was wrong and I was undone.

I had roots in the shade where the beams couldn't reach me,
I leaned far to the side and still couldn't see,
but the gardener told his daughter that the sun would scorch me,
and since them I am very content to be.

6. Panicking

It has been a year of closing my eyes
and waiting to die on the rollercoaster.
Surely, at the next bend, and the next drop
me and all these people will be split and torn;
my body is pulled into rock density,
fingers trying to squeeze back inside thick flesh,
but I know that just as I stepped safely and alive off the ride,
that someday, somehow, this has to end too.

It's just the question -- should I get used to it?
Should I open my eyes and throw up my hands and
scream with joy, and can I?
Around me half laugh and half cry
and it is my habit to cry, my birthright to cry, but

should I open my eyes
and say it's okay to be alone?
Should I start finding peace
in my quiet, small home, in the still air,
in closed windows and dim lights?

I am a child of a zodiac full of kaleidoscopic luster,
but should I start finding myself
in greys and man-made cement, too?

7. more nostalgia

bare feet on the ground just beyond the path
concrete in sight, but grass stalks bent to feel;
paper in danger from the rain, held under cupped hand
and head bowed beneath a street light
illuminating streaks of spring at night.

reading a letter out loud at dawn
just a whisper, but loud enough to ripple away;
words struck down by fat, ripe raindrops
unafraid of oncoming, unseasonal heat,
the summer smell of dirt slinking through uncaulked windows
and even my half-dead father hears

she is proclaiming she is free --
and how? she will share
she is proclaiming she will go back
to everything she loved at ten years old

bonfire nights and camping with mom
stacks of books all read at the same time next to her bed
afternoons in front of the TV watching
the same movie over and over until memorized,
sisters near and chanting along.

why grow, when everything that was good was already had?
why move on, when everything precious is in the past?

8. confounded

in a dark car with dark windows
and the light of a gas station in the rear view mirror
we sat still in a machine of motion
and we cried at the same time.

the song on the radio was the one
we had heard in the garbage room
while separating cans from toilet paper rolls,
was the one we pulled phones from back pockets
to place the singer; was the one we nodded heads along
and said it was good, it was nice

but we didn't know it was about that.

we didn't know it was reminding us
how much we missed everything.
as if everyone was thrown into a foreign country
but everything is too similar to know whether
to adapt or to blend -- why should i stop holding hands?

god, and there is no way to go back
so should we hold mass funerals and fall into mass graves?
no, not quite that serious, but
then why the ripping at our chests
and the feeling short of breath?
then why the deep grief at the thought of
meeting uncovered faces in a roller rink,
passing pizza with dirty hands
and taking pictures, heads within spitting distance??

a man was watching from the pump,
gas flowing past him into his truck,
and he watched us,
confounded.

9. Looking up
{written with Pengu}

The sky is gray and leaking, but so so far away it is Blue.
I watch the mountains form there, fists full of crushing cloud,
crowns of gold beneath and pushing up, up, into
the space beyond: a faith-filled endeavour that asked
for more empty days and faint breezes.
Let us rest. "Let us pray."

10. I Could Not Be Brave

A long, straight highway into the dark dark.
Pine trees and cypress trees instead of street lights.

Static on the radio instead of your voice rambling
about space and cowboys and actors I don't know --
because I chose the safe, small path into a known Domesti City
rather than taking your many, many outstretched hands in mine.

You are somewhere.
Maybe you are the dust stuck inside tent poles that will never come out
and also never amount to anything. Idle and idling.

But in one moment you had been a portal, a swinging door
into sweet sunned afternoons with warming bottles and chill pens
and poetry and Kafka and seeing the world in arcs and bends together

and finding significance in the way grapes rolled off our counters
and taking pictures to make it long art beyond ourselves
and small weddings full of dark, un-famous paintings
and friends in hats and veils and mustaches and rolled up sleeves // pants

and knowing that each sentence had ages and years of thought behind it
because you, too, have drawn connections between each thing inside you
so that even "good night" means you are remembering

sitting by empty train tracks with cigarettes and unknown swings,
dirty hair and ripped sandals, but beneath everything the scent of jasmine.

11. scared

when we were on the hill together
the trees seemed like a blanket on a window
and the stars pierced through a dark
that would keep us, preserved and still.

when i am on the hill alone
each space between each branch
is miles wide, and every dog can see me
and fanged barks run up the slope
to meet me.

12. Timeless

In an camper from the seventies, but in 2010,
we let the aroma of a fire seep from our jeans --
into quilts my grandma made -- when we asked,
"Why are we here and what will we do?"

Almost the last time I was seen as Potential.

Days pass every day
where I am just a pawn in someone else's life;
"the coordinator" "the acquaintance" "the foreigner"
"the daughter" "the girlfriend" but never
"the Potential"

until you,
again (because it was Almost).

In a parking lot, parking brake pulled up
you asked me who had played house with me at recess
and who had received deep sentiment after good books
and who had held my throat to the wall for not tying my shoes
and who had thrown hot coffee when it was the wrong order
and who had touched me when I was dreaming
and who had leeched the momentum out of
my bright dying cometry?

We used to ask questions like this.
We used to listen carefully to the answers
because then we were trying to figure out
who our friends WERE,
and here in a car thousands of miles from
the camper and the quilt,
you were stealing time out of the fabric
and seeing it was all me at the same time:
the little girl at the library who was
Made of Alcott and fairy tales,
the worn paper at the edges of a journal cover AND
flowers in the woods at spring --
you are seeing it all, saw it all, will see it all.

You give me unbloomed flowers
because you see it: the potential.

13. If Someone Wrote a Poem About You and You Did Not Know

I. i wish you had not sent me this poem

There are many dark corners in my house
where we haven't found the right lamps to place
and where I smile when I find my dog
curled up in domestic shade.

We move paintings away from those corners
and into bright lights near new sconces;
we move plants onto fresh-painted windowsills;
we move books on shelves next to photoalbums.

Suddenly I am finding myself drawn to stand in these corners.

The walls may have ears but they do not have eyes
as I face inward and open the page over and over to replay
and rewind and replay days from our youth
when we had not yet wrinkled into self-preservation.

There are few who knew my silly self then,
fewer who remember now a decade beyond,
and still fewer who hold it and revere it like ...

the bird we watched together, writhing on the grass,
our hearts in our toes as we thought without saying
"Is it dead? Will it die? Is it dead? Should we go?"
before it -- with such a heavy body we had already seen
as one inextricable with the earth --
took the word miracle and made it tangible
as it pushed flesh onto air at just the right angle
that somehow, like it was the first time since the birth of the world,
made flight possible; took our hearts with it.

We did not, but we should have, held hands and jumped and danced
for the joy of the bird who Made, in that moment, Flight.
With us as the witness, with God as our witness.


II. we didn't even talk about writing at all

It is as if I am halved, and I gave myself voluntarily to be halved
and there is no one left around me to say Pull Yourself Together.

Half of my life lies in drawers and old journals, where
the first time I moved I took them with me and
the second time I moved I took them with me and
the third time I moved I left them behind because I hadn't
opened them anyway.

I kept them because I know they need to be opened;
daily, I should study the meaning of my being and my past,
but it is a habit now to just swim without looking back
and convince myself the islands that pass by are
no use to me anyway.

When I hear Kindergarteners say they are too busy
for the three pages of homework they were given,
I know where that comes from and wonder if the parents say
it about things they do not want to do or also about things they want to do
and if the kids will grow up to say they are too busy to
try to love you anyway.

14. Triceps

Her mother will lift her up
and weathered skin will slide over
well-crafted, well-packed, well-sunned triceps
and her fingers will hold her in,

but the words will be essential oils
in scents of fraud and desperation --
hating a specific brand of people
because she dislikes socializing
but she knows she must socialize
and this feels like socializing safe within hate
when they tell her to wield guns against the ones that hurt her --

and as she grasps, her triceps contract and extend,
but the hate slips the love out
and retakes the throne
while somehow blaming the one it foisted
for not loving her mother enough to hold on.